Counting Cats in Zanzibar"It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar" - Henry David Thoreau2015-07-31T11:46:57Zhttp://www.countingcats.com/?feed=atomWordPressNickMhttp://www.countingcats.com/?p=185562015-07-31T11:46:57Z2015-07-31T11:46:57Z

Knock-up a few poster size and put ‘em up in the Pas-de-Calais region and the job’s a good un! We’ll have a “swarm” of migrants upping sticks and moving South within hours! No need for the Gurkhas. Yes, a Tory MP seriously suggested deploying them.

This is what happened. My wife’s laptop just stopped (Lenovo E335, Win 8.1). She was forced to do a hard reset – yank power cable and battery. For some reason this resulted in her OpenOffice spreadsheet with her accounts on disappearing. We have both tried all the usual stuff. But they seem gone from end of Feb. This is a big problem. It’s OpenOffice 4 BTW.

Any help would be very greatly received.

]]>7Julie near Chicagohttp://http://www.countingcats.com/?p=185482015-07-30T21:33:27Z2015-07-30T21:10:11ZFrom which today’s QOTD was taken. Debunks the trumped-up statistical survey on which one of the current campus-rape scandal-stories is based. (I assume that Miss LeFauve’s story eviscerating the reported “study,” which Mr. Morrissey cites and which is NOT TO BE MISSED, as it covers quite a bit more ground than Mr. Morrissey’s précis, is accurate. –Nowadays I feel obliged to include that as a standard caveat, since so much on all sides of various aisles turns out to be full of mouldy Swiss cheese or worse.)

Let’s start this topic with the latest in a long series of debunked claims resulting from studies that are later discovered to be either incompetently conducted or flat-out fraud. Reason’s Linda LeFauve dismantles one of the key bases for the supposed epidemic of “rape culture” on college campuses, a study published in 2002 by University of Massachusetts-Boston professor David Lisak. This study, LeFauve notes, has informed current White House policies on Title IX enforcement [pdf] as well as documentaries and books on the subject of college rape. It had at least an indirect impact on Rolling Stone’s debunked UVA campus rape hoax from last December.

It’s also based on shoddy research and deception [pdf, Lisak, "Statement to U.S. Civil Rights Commission...] , as LeFauve discovered when researching the study. Despite claiming to have conducted the research himself, Lisak actually derived it from student theses on another topic entirely — adult survivors of child abuse, using non-random samples mainly consisting of UMB employees and non-resident students:….

David Lisak’s serial predator theory of campus rape has made him a celebrity. Once a virtually unknown associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, his work is now cited by White House officials and reporters for major newspapers.

His influence is evident in the recent documentary The Hunting Ground, and the producers continue to promote his work along with their film. In Jon Krakauer’s new book, Missoula, about sexual assault at the University of Montana, Lisak’s name appears more than 100 times.

…. [SNIP]

]]>1Julie near Chicagohttp://http://www.countingcats.com/?p=185352015-07-30T21:12:00Z2015-07-30T20:25:49Z

Due process exists to protect people from mob rule and moral panics, as well as to protect us from those who would stoke those panics for their own political purposes.

–Ed Morrissey, “False Data and the Moral Panic that Follows: A Threat to Liberty.”

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

John Harington – Epigrams

In the latest round of the sorry saga that is modern Greece we have a further example of how the corrupting and totalitarian influence of the European Union has now spread in that it would appear that attempting to replace the Euro with a restored national currency is now treason.

“The context of all this is that they want to present me as a rogue finance minister, and have me indicted for treason. It is all part of an attempt to annul the first five months of this government and put it in the dustbin of history,” he said.

“It totally distorts my purpose for wanting parallel liquidity. I have always been completely against dismantling the euro because we never know what dark forces that might unleash in Europe,” he said.

The goal of the computer hacking was to enable the finance ministry to make digital transfers at “the touch of a button”. The payments would be ‘IOUs’ based on an experiment by California after the Lehman banking crisis.

A parallel banking system of this kind would allow the government to create euro liquidity and circumvent what Syriza called “financial strangulation” by the ECB.

I am no fan of Yanis Varoufakis who is just another dreadful little Marxist troll, but any decent economist will acknowledge that given the prospect of the ECB funding being stopped for any period of time then parallel currency measures such as IOU’s are a rational response to the problem.

Only in the cloud-cuckoo land of Eurozone politics could this be a justification for treason, at most Varoufakis exceeded his authority, but then surely Greek PM Alexis Tsipras did as well, in which case he should be impeached?

Exercising the right to disown a child might sound like something out of a Dickens novel, but throughout British history those with property have been free to dispose of it after death as they saw fit, provided they left a clearly written statement of intention, witnesses by two parties that were not beneficiaries of the will.

Thus if Lady Sybil runs away with Branson the chauffeur then the Earl of Grantham is quite within his rights to disinherit her by removing her from his will or alternately leaving a paragraph in his will saying why she was to be left nothing.

Time and again, adult relatives have attempted to overturn wills that have disinherited them and left a small fortune to the Battersea Dogs Home and by and large they’ve been disappointed. The only exception being children under the age of 21 and this was explicitly covered under a right to “reasonable provision” which is contained in the 1975 Inheritance Act.

Not any more though.

In a landmark ruling (which can only be described as perverse), the UK Court of Appeal has decided that the expressly written intention of the late Mrs. Melita Jackson to disinherit her daughter because she eloped at the age of 17 (contained in both the will and an accompanying letter) is to be ignored and an alternative judicial settlement imposed.

The Court of Appeal ruled that Mrs Ilott would otherwise face a life of poverty because she was on benefits and could not afford to go on holiday or buy clothes for her children.

The fact that Mrs Jackson had little connection to the charities to which she left her money played a part in the ruling, the judges said.

The argument being used is that the late mother was being unreasonable in both her initial reaction and her subsequent refusal of attempts to reconcile, but just because the mother was a bitch doesn’t give the state the right to override her final wishes.

I mean what the hell are we? French?*

* - Under French law it is not possible to totally disinherit your children. The French civil coded requires that your children will inherit at least 75% of your share of the property.

It’s taken Labour’s weird collection of narcissistic loons, stunted students, never-was-never-will-bes, old school socialists and shiny neo-socialists fighting like demented rats in a transparent sack for the BBC even to mention that there might just be some small amount of trouble up at t’ mill.

I must admit that I’ve always been puzzled how the BBC and Guardianistas could claim that their respective oracles weren’t biased, given the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I’ve finally come to the conclusion that they live such socially narrow and insulated lives that they genuinely believe this to be true. Such an “echo chamber” existence is not restricted to the internet, but can be found amongst the organic polenta of Islington high street.

You would think that politicians large and small would have enough incentive not to make utter fools of themselves before national audiences on TV or the front pages of national and even local rags, but evidence suggests not – hyperbole before idiocy it seems.

I’ve never been involved in the legislative process, only in the attempted implementation and enforcement of pollution legislation for Her Majesty’s inspectorate of Pollution (HMIP) as an IT consultant back in the early 90′s, but one of the most important aspects of any proposal must surely be not to propose legislation which is unenforceable. Surely?

The passage of unenforceable laws (such as the various alcohol/drug/gambling prohibitions in the US) or laws which can be easily circumvented/ignored (censorship/licensing of pornography for example) end up bringing the law as a whole into disrepute.

When police officers are catching bank robbers and muggers they have the support of the law-abiding majority, but when they end up as petty enforcers of public morality or expression then such widespread public support is lost.

Take David Cameron and his idiotic “ISIS use encryption, therefore lets ban all encryption” viewpoint. Even the most cursory understanding of how the internet works would make you realise that such a proposal if implemented would mean the end of internet eCommerce in the UK, to highlight just a single instance.

The only purpose of such unworkable schemes seems to be to lay the groundwork for ever more draconian (and expensive) monitoring regimes which either never work or are so intrusive that people go elsewhere.

One insider at a major US technology firm told the Guardian that “politicians are fond of asking why it is that tech companies don’t base themselves in the UK”.

“I think if you’re saying that encryption is the problem, at a time when consumers and businesses see encryption as a very necessary part of trust online, that’s a very indicative point of view.”

Maybe I am being naïve, but the only beneficiaries of this sort of thing are civil service bureaucrats and the massive IT and outsourcing companies which win the contracts to implement all this crap.